Saturday, May 30, 2009

questions of identity, updates

I've been thinking about this for some time now, about identity as ethnicity. I thought of ways of putting it that might get people up in arms, and then I realized no one reads this blog, but I think I'll attempt delicacy anyway.

Who is more Japanese? A child who is not ethnically Japanese but is, say, through adoption, raised by Japanese parents in Japan, speaks only Japanese, and has no contact with members of their original ethnicity? Or a child who is of Japanese ethnicity but is raised by non-Japanese in a place where they have no contact with Japanese culture or that ethnic group? These are the most extreme examples that come to my mind when I think about adoption, mixed-race and culture marriages, and this sort of thing. Because I think that, no matter what, first impressions are tied up entirely in what they can see genetically. Our sight comes first. Second would be language. Then environment. We would think of someone who looks Japanese as more Japanese than someone who doesn't look "Japanese" (or any other distinct ethnic group). I should go back to anthropology to study this.

Sigh. Anyhow, onto other things, I wrote a short that is going to be produced by some friends of mine. Hopefully, filming will happen in August. It's a fun little gothic musical. More details to come.